A Discussion of Thomas Hardy Late Lyric "Winter Night in Woodland (Old
Time)"

ike his other lyrics written between 1922 and 1925, Hardy's "Winter Night
in Woodland (Old Time)" [text of poem] eschews both the bitterness of the war poems and
self-flagellation of the "Emma" verses as it reverts to the Green World of
his early life and writing career. His once-innocent vision the Green
World, however, is now filtered
through the consciousness of a worldly-wise adult who acknowledges the presence
of "dark figures" among us and yet knows enough of the world not to be disturbed
by them. The series of
quasi-pastoral poems from this period includes "The Sheep-Boy," "Life and Death at Sunrise,"
"A Light Snow-Fall After Frost," "Last Week in October," "A Sheep Fair,"
"Last Look Round St. Martin's Fair," "Shortening Days at the Homestead," "An
East-End Curate," "A Backward Spring" (the exception, being published in
Moments of Vision in 1917), "Ice on the Highway," "No Buyers," and
"Winter Night in Woodland." These Hardy poems differ greatly from the traditional pastoral originated by Theocritus and Virgil and maintained by Shakespeare and Sir Philip Sidney, which describes a golden age of humanity and nature in harmony; it is based on the idealised
vision of urban-dwellers. Thus, the countryman Hardy's more realistic vision
lacks the traditional nostalgia for a natural life of peace and
simplicity, and it cannot therefore be termed an "idyll." The unalloyed purity of nymphs, shepherds, and shepherdesses of Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Christopher Marlowe is replaced in Hardy by those engaged in the Darwinian struggle for survival in a countryside not entirely devoid of the sinister.

The setting of "Winter Night in Woodland (Old Time)" is drawn partly from Hardy's personal experiences of the area around his boyhood home, the old cottage at Bockhampton, and partly from the fictive woods of Under the Greenwood Tree and The Woodlanders. This is not the purely pastoral world of Shakespeare's Forest of Arden, for negative elements are present, such as the obscuring fog in "The Sheep-Boy" and a drenching downpour in "A Sheep Fair." In "Winter Night in Woodland (Old Time)," such an element is the presence of night-time predators and outlaws: foxes, bird-baiters, poachers, and smugglers. It is neither the bloody Forest of Ardenne, the killing ground of the First World War that spawned Hardy's bitter anti-war verses,
nor the bleak natural world of "The Darkling Thrush" and Jude the
Obscure. The pheasants (like the heifer about to be sacrificed in
Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn") are still unharmed in the golden moment
Hardy captures, not trashing about on the ground in their death-throes, as
in that memorable incident in Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

A setting
sun has suddenly penetrated the gathering gloom at the end of Hardy's life,
casting a golden glow over the woodland, and, though it has set before the
poem begins, there is a delicacy and mellowness that belie the night-time
setting. These are not the deep and dark woods of Robert Frost's snowy
evening, for Hardy (although a detached observer rather than an engaged
commentator) permits us to hear (stanza one) and see (stanzas two and three)
the interaction of the animals and the humans attuned to this green world,
and then both to see and hear once again those cherished figures from the
Mellstock Quire, "Robert Penny, the Dewys, Mail, Voss, and the rest," who
have just completed their seasonal tromp around the cottages to sing the old
songs of Hardy's youth. Their culminating entry into the woodland clarifies
the setting as remembered and allusionary rather than the present and the
real.

Initially, each stanza seems detached, a lyric description which has
nothing in common with its mates but the elements of time and place. But
gradually the scenes overlap into a collage of the real pastoral that young
Thomas Hardy knew in those Bockhampton woods, each scene developed by
selective detail, predators and prey, lawbreakers and musicians. No violence
enters here; although there is the promise of death from "The hand of man"
raised against the fox and the pheasants, there is no actual carnage; the
anticipated slaughter is not to be on the grand scale of the Great War, nor
is it to be pointless and wasteful: everyone is doing what he needs to do to
survive. This is an ecological microcosm, a world in balance, unlike the
greater world about whose fate Hardy has lamented in prose and verse, the
increasingly cruel and callous society of mankind which fails to appreciate
the natural world. "Yet this [natural cycle] will go onward the same, /
Though Dynasties pass," as Hardy himself reflects in "In Time of 'the
Breaking of Nations'" (1913, but probably begun upon the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War in 1870). In "Winter Night in Woodland (Old Time)," we
and Hardy take comfort in watching the enduring scene which camera-like
Hardy has recorded in these "Winter Words" because he depicts the "Human
Show" as part of a greater whole. There is nothing impersonal, despite the
absence of the narrator in these scenes, about the lovingly chosen details
that accumulate to produce this appreciation of the Green World, for despair
and satire both are absent. Lines that seem "value-free" are in fact an
assertion of the value of observation without intrusion, of simply letting
the natural rhythm of things be without overt comment or criticism because
Nature merely Is — it is neither good nor evil.